Holger’s Blog

One thing that was on my TODO for already quite some time was to have a look at that half-new language called Python. Because an old-fashioned “Hello World” is far too simple here, I was looking for some kind of project to get familiar with the basic principles.

One thing I found quite annoying in the past was the fact that I always had to disable some kind of radios in some far too complicated ways to save some battery power. Modern laptops often have multiple killswitches for their wireless communication devices like bluetooth, WLAN or WWAN. So that was the chance for me to seize, and the output looks like this:

From the README:

killswitch-applet is a small application sitting in the system tray providing the possibility to manage all the killswitches found in the system. In this context, “managing” means enabling or disabling certain killswitches. This is especially useful if you have multiple killswitches like bluetooth, WWAN or WLAN seen in many modern laptops.

Tray Icon on the Left

The source tarball for version 0.1 can be downloaded here: killswitch-applet-0.1

The summary here definitely is: Wow, that was damn simple! Especially when it comes down to GTK programming and D-Bus interaction, Python definitely provides a very good way to hack those things together quite easily. The whole source file contains a whole of 189 lines of code including comments.

Another question: Is it worth creating a sourceforge project for this? I’ll wait until and if I’m getting some feedback.

Note for openSUSE users:

Of course this is also available in the openSUSE Buildservice. Go to http://software.opensuse.org/search and search for “killswitch-applet”.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 23:29 and is filed under General, Laptops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.